[I]n order to avoid paying fines or buying massively more expensive health plans that are ObamaCare-compliant, Darden is now experimenting with limiting its employees’ hours instead. By keeping workers to fewer than 30 hours per week, Darden can categorize them as “part-time.” Thus, the company avoids the ObamaCare fines and leaves employees to the new government health insurance exchanges, where they may receive subsidies to purchase insurance. At least two other restaurant chains — White Castle and McDonald’s — are considering similar plans.

“So to sum up, Obamacare is leading to fewer hours worked, less tax revenue for the government and bigger government subsidies for health insurance for people who were already insured in the first place. If enough companies do this, Obamacare will become a massive dead weight on the federal budget, even as it does little more than shuffle people from one insurance plan to another, whether they like it or not.”

Floccina you are correct, and not just about health care. Family leave, overtime rules, unemployment benefits…….all these areas have huge minefields where coverage is very selective based on part-time and headcount status.

Why does this happen over and over again with Congress?

I offer three reasons:

– The US has no real Labor Party that would monitor new laws carefully, and insist that protections be universal;

– Congressional staffers who write these laws think that all employers are as generous as the government

– Politicians remember how small business scuttled the Clinton health care reforms.

I know this is a tired argument, but we’re letting legislators enact programs that they are exempt from. There should be a bring your politician to work day. Give them the same opportunity a 9 year old gets.. one day a year where they can live in the real world before it’s back to Spongebob, crayons, and fundraisers.

For almost 20 years, Social Security did not cover agricultural workers or domestic workers. This was a concession to the Southern Democrats in Congress, who wanted no benefits to go to black people….(“Those shirts don’t fold themselves….”)

Today the exclusions are not quite so sinister.

Small businesses are excluded from mandates in part because Congress knows they cannot afford the mandates. This sounds almost compassionate, but it causes other problems:

the workers may still get shafted;

and, more tellingly, a lot of low wage and temp workers are employed by very large corporations who certainly could afford the mandates.

Also, liberals sometimes assume that a firm will just raise prices when the cost of labor goes up due to regulations. After all, many liberals work in government or education, where prices are raised all the time for that reason.